You might want to think twice before using unique, niche distros like GoboLinux, Alpine, or NixOS. PuppyLinux doesn’t look like a proper distro, more like the equivalent of EndeavourOS or Artix. Since you’re using Linux for the first time, why not use Linux Mint, Ubuntu or Fedora?
No not really. Gnome for me is about 2.5 gigs of Ram, XFCE 700 megabytes and the CPU load also is way lower. XFCE can be heavy or light depending on how you configure it
Heck ya to Fedora, glad to see it recommended for a first time user. It’s not much more difficult than Mint, but you can also get into the weeds instead of having to find a new distro after Mint. Mint basically has permanent training wheels, while with Fedora you can pop em off whenever it’s convient.
Edit: Fedora is also a more up to date Alpine and it’s not directly controlled by Red Hat.
Force people to move to Wayland. Everyone that complains about Wayland breaking their setup knows how to install Xorg anyways. But most Wayland problems are software vendors not giving a shit. Make them give a shit by breaking their shit by default on most setups. 10 years was enough time to make your software work on Wayland. If your software doesn’t work on Wayland by now, then your risk management is shit.
It’s not only software vendors but Wayland itself lacks some crucial features. For me it’s auto-type and screen magnification - both are showstoppers for me.
Not the same as “on demand zooming”, which let’s one stick with a high, native resolution, but zoom in when required (e.g. websites with small text that can’t be zoomed via browser’s font size increase; e.g. referencing some UI stuff during UI design, without having to take a screenshot and pasting + zooming it in e.g. GIMP).
What? Strg + Mousewheel, you can even set the option to only zoom text. At least on firefox. No clue what kind of browser you are using which is not capable of that.
Yeah, that browser zoom. And I too used / use Firefox. I’m not saying these kind of sites are common, but nevertheless I’ve encountered them occasionally. Back then, the most pragmatic workaround was to use desktop zooming of Xfce.
My intention on the previous comment was simply to give some examples of desktop zooming that go beyond the typical accessibility viewpoint (e.g. vision impairment).
Autotype is already solved - ydotool, wtype and dotool exists (and possibly others as well).
Screen magnification is already present in KDE (Meta + +, Meta + - to zoom in/out). There’s also a magnifier tool (KMag). There may be similar functionalities in other DEs.
My issue is the lack of an overall GUI automation tool, ie, like AutoHotkey. X11 had PyAutoGUI, but there’s no such AIO equivalent for Wayland yet, and the PyAutoGUI devs don’t seem to be interested in Wayland support - it’s neither on their road map, nor have they even answered any Wayland questions on their Github page, which is disappointing. But this isn’t Wayland’s fault, when other tools have shown that automating the GUI is possible, we just need someone to put together a complete package like PyAutoGUI / AHK.
feel free to check out map2, I’m currently working on version 2 which will do lots of the stuff you need when it’s ready, but currently the API might still change and docs are active WIP
still, it can already do most stuff I need it for :)
Autotype is already solved - ydotool, wtype and dotool exists (and possibly others as well).
These tools work by creating a virtual keyboard so they don’t let you send input to a specific window. The input goes to whatever happens to be focused at the moment. This makes them less reliable than the X11 equivalents and unusable for tasks where you need to guarantee that the right window gets the input.
If that’s the case, then stick to Xorg for now. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s in your best interest for distros to ship with Wayland out of the box.
Do you want software you use to be compatible with Wayland now or later? If your answer is later, then you have to wait for vendors to catch up, even though Wayland got auto type (already exists) and screen magnification by then. This is why I never understood this push against Wayland. People, your only alternative to Wayland is dead and unmaintained. If you push against Wayland as the default option, you only make your transition in the future more painful than it needs to be.
Also, I think it’s still a software vendor problem. If your software can’t work with the only desktop protocol with a future, then you must contribute to the protocol to create a way to make it work. If you don’t do that, then shit happens, your software breaks, and you had 10 years to contribute to the protocol to fix it. Your risk management was once again exceptional at avoiding doing the necessary work to eliminate a long known risk.
People, your only alternative to Wayland is dead and unmaintained. If you push against Wayland as the default option, you only make your transition in the future more painful than it needs to be.
Nobody’s pushing “against Wayland”. I don’t give a shit about Wayland or Xorg. What I care about is having a full-featured, easy to use desktop stack readily available. The “dead” Xorg works perfectly with everything. That’s the bar.
When I get a checkbox on the login screen saying “use Wayland” (or when the distro does it by default) I need everything to work. If everything does not work, I do not use it.
The Wayland choice of pushing complexity onto individual software projects by making them all reinvent a hundred wheels, and onto users by making them hunt down a hundred pieces of software to build a wobbly desktop stack sucks. I have no incentive to take part in this particular rat race.
Nobody’s pushing “against Wayland”. I don’t give a shit about Wayland or Xorg. What I care about is having a full-featured, easy to use desktop stack readily available.
Install Xorg yourself. Don’t make it easily accessible to new Linux users. Software vendors will take note and postpone doing any work for as long as possible.
And you obviously care a lot about Wayland and Xorg.
The “dead” Xorg works perfectly with everything. That’s the bar.
No, it doesn’t. And if it does, then it’s still insecure by design. When I hear statements like these, I get the urge to publish PoC Linux malware code on GitHub that uses X11 specific features to show just how not fine it is.
The Wayland choice of pushing complexity onto individual software projects by making them all reinvent a hundred wheels, and onto users by making them hunt down a hundred pieces of software to build a wobbly desktop stack sucks.
Substitute Wayland for X11 here. Both Wayland and X11 are protocols. X11 is such a lackluster protocol that all implementations died, except that Xorg still has users.
Install Xorg yourself. Don’t make it easily accessible to new Linux users.
New users will drop any distro whose default desktop doesn’t work perfectly and with all the features they want. Linux already has a high enough bar competing with Windows, creating additional artificial hurdles is dumb in the extreme.
And if it does, then it’s still insecure by design.
Security vs convenience has always been a give and take. There’s a cutoff point that users will not cross if the software becomes too inconvenient to use, even if it means greater security. The Wayland stack is currently on the bad side of that line and needs to step over if it wants to see mass adoption.
Substitute Wayland for X11 here. Both Wayland and X11 are protocols. X11 is such a lackluster protocol that all implementations died, except that Xorg still has users.
Nobody cares, all they see is the stack, with Wayland leading the point on the bad decisions.
And you obviously care a lot about Wayland and Xorg.
You are projecting. If this were any other piece of software, say, a text editor that works and does everything you need, and someone came and told you “you must use this new one, it’s the way forward, but oh it doesn’t have all the features you need from a text editor” you would say “thanks but I’ll wait until it’s ready”. But you see no problem in pushing Wayland on people who can’t use it?
Please understand that nobody will ever successfuly push through incomplete software. Not on Linux. There’s nothing you or anybody can do to convince people that incomplete software is complete and usable when it’s not.
New users will drop any distro whose default desktop doesn’t work perfectly and with all the features they want. Linux already has a high enough bar competing with Windows, creating additional artificial hurdles is dumb in the extreme.
Both Wayland and X11 are an artificial hurdle to someone, so at least pick the sane choice with a future.
Security vs convenience has always been a give and take. There’s a cutoff point that users will not cross if the software becomes too inconvenient to use, even if it means greater security. The Wayland stack is currently on the bad side of that line and needs to step over if it wants to see mass adoption.
No, Wayland is doing fine.
Nobody cares, all they see is the stack, with Wayland leading the point on the bad decisions.
Oh no, Wayland isn’t X11. It’s almost as if Wayland isn’t supposed to be 1:1 bug compatible with Xorg.
You are projecting. If this were any other piece of software, say, a text editor that works and does everything you need, and someone came and told you “you must use this new one, it’s the way forward, but oh it doesn’t have all the features you need from a text editor” you would say “thanks but I’ll wait until it’s ready”. But you see no problem in pushing Wayland on people who can’t use it?
I don’t know about what text editors you use, but my text editor doesn’t allow malware to log all keystrokes, tamper with windows of other apps, steal clipboard contents without consent, inject keystrokes into other windows, escalate privileges, and install rootkits that persist OS re-installs using the escalated privileges.
People work on Wayland. Nobody works on Xorg. Alternatives don’t exist.
Please understand that nobody will ever successfuly push through incomplete software. Not on Linux. There’s nothing you or anybody can do to convince people that incomplete software is complete and usable when it’s not.
Do you need a refresher about systemd, pulseaudio, etc.? I’m not in the systemd haters camp, but pulseaudio broke regularly for me. Yet every distro included pulseaudio.
I really wanted Wayland to work for me. I just bought a new ASUS laptop (and ASUS has a great Linux compatibility track record, mind you!), 7th Gen Ryzen+Radeon, all AMD. I figured, let’s use Wayland on this one.
I installed KDE Neon, updated the kernel (some stuff is broken on the LTS kernel, no big deal, easy fix), switched to the Wayland session, everything was fine…until I opened any chromium-based app. Crashed kwin, killed the session completely, it recovered, but in a new session. Switched to X11, everything works. Maybe if I grabbed a newer mesa from a PPA it would work, but:
Crashing the window manager killing the session is awful and doesn’t happen in X11
Chromium shouldn’t crash the compositor at all
Even if it’s AMD’s new graphics drivers being buggy, that still shouldn’t kill the session!
And I know, technically KDE could (and afaik, is) implement session management so that doesn’t happen. But to my knowledge, literally 0 WMs/DEs can recover the session after a compositor crash currently, and that’s a big deal.
If you still want to give Wayland a try, take a look at wiki.archlinux.org/title/wayland#Electron. Electron still defaults to X11, even though Electron supports Wayland. It’s a bit annoying to set the command line parameters for apps that bundle Electron, but maybe it works for you.
You know what’s super ironic? I went through this exact thing with X, 25 years ago, when you had to put together a Linux desktop with spit and duct tape.
Wayland promises to be much nicer than X but the way it asks you to put together a working desktop stack yourself is straight out of the '90s.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
10 years was enough time to make your software work on Wayland.
By that logic, one could answer that 15 years was enough time to make Wayland work better than it does… but that would be petty and disingenous.
Desktop stacks are very complex. X.org took 30 years to beat that complexity into a usable shape. Wayland pushed most complexity up the stack and still took 15 years to finally put together a protocol of beta quality.
It will take the rest of the stack however long it will take to build on that protocol. Most of the Linux community are volunteers, and Wayland was and still is work in progress. Nobody in their right mind rushes to write software on top of an unstable protocol.
If Wayland is truly ready I think we will see meaningful stack adoption within the next 5 years. But I don’t think trying to force developers into it will achieve anything.
As for forcing users that’s completely unreasonable. If you’re using XFCE on Nvidia you’ll have to wait for XFCE to get Wayland support and for Wayland to get Nvidia support. Very few people are willing to change their whole desktop stack or able to buy a new graphics card for the sake of… of what? Bringing about the Year of the Linux Desktop?
This is a terrible recommendation and I hope as few people follow it as possible.
People like you are why Linux has a reputation for always being broken; as soon as we get something that works and is stable, we gotta move to the next broken thing.
The same thing will be said about Wayland in 20 years, if it ever reaches feature-parity with X.
More important would be to have another device where you can go to internet to google or to download binaries for the time if you get stuck.
My first time I couldn’t connect to internet because I was missing firmware for the laptop. I had to use the computer at my work to troubleshoot it and download the necessary package to get it working. That took a lot of days.
Does xrandr work on Wayland? I thought it was an X11 tool. That would be so cool, I use it to change the brightness on my laptop’s monitor when KDE’s gui thing stops working (after sleep, I think). I think I looked for a replacement for Wayland but did not find anything a while back
My favourite “lesson” I ever gave was in a grade 9 technology class. It was a pretty small class, about 10 kids. I split them up into two teams and made a competition. They chose their own teams — it ended up being boys vs girls. I never would have made it that way on my own but that’s how it worked out.
The school had a bunch of old, decommissioned PCs that were headed to the junk yard. I sorted through all of them to get two exact sets of working parts for the competition.
The goal of the competition was to recover a jpeg from one of the hard drives. Each team had a computer with the ram removed and two hard drives. One was blank and the other had the jpeg on it. They also had a Linux Mint installer on a usb stick.
I don’t remember exactly how I had set it up but it was points based, something about getting to different stages first. Like 5 points to be the team that turns the computer on first. One of the big ones was that they got an extra 10 points if they did the whole thing without a mouse.
I told the other classes about the competition and asked some other teachers if it would be okay for them to watch and cheer on. It ended up being the nerdiest and most exciting class ever. Students were literally cheering each team through a Linux install. One team got stuck and had to pull out the mouse. There was booing. It was so epic.
The girls won, being the first to recover the jpeg and they did it all without a mouse. It was so awesome. The jpeg was the meme about how would a dog wear pants.
It was about 5 years ago, my first year teaching. I really miss those days. I only teach math now, and while I like that, there was something magical about showing kids how fun computers can be.
@maxprime@nayminlwin what an amazing story. I love that this could be gamified for them and made more fun. I presume you had a guide or helped them when they got stuck?
I had some of my classes (14-15yr olds) assemble their own computers as the first class. It was cheap junk anyway, and I was willing to risk it, but it set the stage for the year. I dont think I got them to install system on it (whole school run on Linux btw), thats a great touch. And making it into something that entertaining, and stereotypes breaking is brilliant!
If i were to become a teacher in the future (unlikely, but not impossible), i'd hope to be just as caring and enjoying the craft as you are. Keep it up! ☺️
Out of curiosity, how much had you already taught them about the tasks? Was it just expected that between the whole team there would be someone who knew this stuff?
If I recall correctly I didn’t tell them much about anything. One of them had a nerd dad who set up his daughter with Linux at home but she wasn’t familiar with the install process. I gave them some basic info when I gave them the rules (you have to connect the hard drives and ram) but for the most part everything was new to them.
On the other hand, I also ran a computer club with some other kids (in a younger grade) where we took that pile of broken computers and salvaged working parts. We ended up with 3 or 4 working pcs that we ran Linux mint on. They used the computers for Roblox or something at lunch lol. The computers ended up being a popular attraction at lunch!
@maxprime my technology teacher in middle school did something similar with me and a bunch of other kids in 1995 or so. That's how I fixed my first pc, and eventually started a career in IT. There was no team competition, but he basicallt said "these are some broken computers, if you can fix them you can have a lab to play Doom or whatever you want. He helped us setting up the IPX network tbf, but we had to check what dimm banks were working, which not, same with hdd and processors, and put togheter everything and install Windows 3.11
Yeah I had formatted and partitioned the disk ahead of time. The JPEG was in the root directory IIRC. I warned them to not plug in both hard drives during the install process to be sure not to overwrite the wrong drive. They were labelled physically but were otherwise identical.
Does this apply to Proton as well, or have they had their own fixes for Vulkan or something? Cause I’ve been playing games on Wayland with Proton just fine for a good while now.
The fun part comes later on, when you get a bit laissez-faire with the backups and kick yourself for missing something and having to configure it from scratch. Then you start tinkering and remember that you actually like configuring things.
I love poking around in good settings menus. I can’t stand Windows 11, and even Windows 10 and 7 are rubbish - there shouldn’t be two layered styles of settings menus, and I shouldn’t have to click through multiple pages to get to the function I want. Android, too, has gotten a bit crap, but at least the search function works well.
So far, everything gets backupped automatically, but on top of this, i already am in the habit of backupping important documents by hand in files that don’t get synced. So, as soon as i’m editing important files, i backup them, on top of the sync folders. I will need to switch to manual backups anyway, since proton drive - which syncs automatically - is not yet available on linux, but they do have a web app where you can backup manually.
Those instructions are from the official docs, and install.sh comes from the source repo. It’s an annoying script (it basically runs apt, npm, make, on your behalf…thanks, I can do that myself), but if you’re trusting the repo source to begin with, I don’t think it’s any less secure.
I honestly don’t get these posts, there’s a couple of things that is super weird.
Why does every discussion about Wayland include trashing xorg?
Isn’t the solution pretty obvious, stop mainting xorg if you don’t like to maintain xorg, who is forcing you to maintain xorg?
I really don’t care if I’m using xorg or wayland, I just want something that works, and I have tried wayland and that isn’t the case as of the moment. And I don’t care about the why, because I can’t be like yeah I use Wayland that’s why I can’t be on this video conference.
Just stop mainting it if you don’t want to maintain it, problem solved, move on.
Seems like a redhat problem, so why is he complaining. It wasn’t the developer who signed an agreement to maintain xorg, so I don’t get the argument. Either you do it for the money you get paid, and if you don’t feel like it’s enough, then don’t do it. The developer can just quit and do something else, ask for another project. The only one who is making him work on xorg is redhat.
But why even mention m it in the same context as Wayland, make Wayland work for the end user and 90% of people would not care if thier Linux machine was using Wayland or xorg.
Yes I’ve had multiple issues with video conferencing on Wayland, but my experience is 1 - 2 years old. I just use what works, I don’t have any technical problems with xorg and that is why I use it.
Why does every discussion about Wayland include trashing xorg?
I don’t know, really, but it’s something I feel I’ve seen before. I thought about it and it’s just fanboyism.
Some people get legitimately angry when they see someone using something they don’t like, and I think Wayland fanboys fit in this category to a tee.
I see the exact same kind of backlash whenever someone brings up Nvidia or Manjaro. The fanboys come out and all take it as an opportunity to recommend what they like because they believe their tastes are superior to everyone else’s.
I switched from ubuntu to osx, and then from osx to Windows when they added wsl as that seemed as close to Linux as I needed.
Eventually, windowses windowsness wore me down, too. I don’t much care about the freedom of linux, I don’t want to tweak and customise things. I just want an os that is focused on being an environment for me to run my Web browser and run my tools.
Yhat sounds like youre looking for an OS in long term support mode. Not a good idea to use consumer OS for that purpose, as new features would always be added to retail operating systems.
You should take some time to look at fsf.org and gnu.org and read up is what Free Software is. It is literally the most important set of principles in the history of computing.
Without these principles, your Linux system would not exist.
Hi, I’ve been around linux and free software since likely before you were born, Theres a good chance that if you use gui software on linux today you are using some of the code I’ve written.
Please don’t lecture people like this, it’s offputting and insulting.
Sadly most Linux users today seem totally clueless as to what the Free Software Movement is. They just see it as another OS. This point of view will see Linux eventually become as full of proprietary junk as the other OS’. Or even proprietary itself.
I’ll stop now, but this is a free speech platform. People are free to ignore me. No one is forcing them to read this.
Lastly, thank you for all your hard work on the code. Appreciate it. 👍
this is basically why i ditched android and switched to iphones.
at the end of the day i need my phone to be a phone more than i need complete control over everything.
same with the PC OS. i like Linux, i like Windows, under some circumstances i even like MacOS. at the end of the day it really doesn't matter what OS i'm using, so long as the software i need to run, runs.
I mean having control over everything also means you have control to not exercise control. Android as a phone OS, depending on what the phone manufacturer has changed, has pretty sane defaults. I can’t say I’ve ever seen the need to switch to iPhones. My Android phone works excellently as a phone.
You should take some time to look at fsf.org and gnu.org and read up is what Free Software is. It is literally the most important set of principles in the history of computing.
Without these principles, your Linux system would not exist.
Where would you recommend a complete Linux noob start after having used Windows his entire life?
I’m in your boat: I want an OS that works (more or less) and will let me browse, listen to music and occasionally fire up a game or two without forcing new money grabbing crap down my throat.
I enjoy troubleshooting strange issues now and then, but if it’s a daily occurrence I’m not interested.
just grab Ubuntu or Linux Mint, and ignore everyone who seems mad about things.
Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, but it’ll feel more at home for a windows user. Ubuntu is a good base because they include drivers that make hardware work, but aren’t open source. a lot of linux os’s don’t do that and it just makes life harder.
Aside from that, if you have a Nvidia gpu it’s going to be a pain and there’s not a lot you can do about it, nvidia sucks on linux. If you want to install an app, use flathub.org - it’ll make life easier in the long run to just install things from there.
While Nvidia isn’t as great on Linux as other cards. It generally works. It’s pretty much fine on Xorg, slowly getting there with Wayland. At least using Nvidia with Hyprland which wlroots based Wayland compositor worked for most cases.
At least using Nvidia with Hyprland which wlroots based Wayland compositor worked for most cases.
this is the part where it doesn’t work well and you are doing all these hoops to try and get something usable ;) what you consider “pretty much fine”, “getting there”, “worked for most cases” is all annoying and broken for others
compared to intel and amd, nvidia on linux is awful and full of roadblocks - i’ll always recommend people stay away if they are going to use linux unless they are comfortable with all the pain
Ram usage in this case would be localized to data “in-transit”, meaning there is an in-memory buffer that is eventually cleared and written to disk in seconds. Unless you have some crazy equipment that can transmit 20Gb/s, don’t worry about.
Been a few years since I did a Debian install, but IMO it's fairly daunting for a noob unless it's changed a lot. I found Arch easier to install (this is not me suggesting you use Arch, just making a comparison - I currently don't use Arch btw.)
I would disagree with the prior poster urging you to use Debian testing/unstable partially because saying it like that as they did implies they are the same, which they are not.
Suggest if you stick with Debian (which is a fine and foundational distro, I'm just not sure it's a good choice for a noob - but again haven't touched vanilla debian in years), you read this page first (and the page for each of the branches) to decide which release to use. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases
Workspace Matrix: provides a customizable n x m workspace grid, and a customizable pop-up that shows live preview of all workspaces and their windows (incl. e.g. video playing).
In combination, these two features allow me very quick overview of everything I have open, presented in an ordered fashion, allowing quick, keyboard-driven application change.
I’m not aware that the exact features of Workspace Matrix are reproduced by anything in any other DE.
Oh, true, you don’t get previews of the windows inside. However, that shouldn’t be very hard to implement, so you might have luck if you ask for it to be in Plasma 6.
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